YouSaid · the spoken record

Phin Barnes

lines on the record: 63
first: 2023-10-02
most recent: 2023-10-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, it's been great. Great to talk to you always. And yeah, focusing on the process, that's the key and find happiness and joy in that and everything else will work out.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think if everything goes right for the general partnership, we will become an institution that matters in venture capital. When we invest in a company, people will say, congratulations, they will nod and understand why it makes sense because we will have a taste that's understood in the market for a certain type of founder, a certain type of company, and a certain way of working, we will have achieved our North Star, which is to be the place that's known to create the best opportunities for the most talented people in Silicon Valley, whether that's a builder on our team, someone that we place into one of our companies or a founder that we partner with. I think creating the very best opportunities for the most talented people and doing that on a repeated basis is sort of the North Star for the firm and the fuel that will serve us as we travel over the next 10 years.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've also recently mixed in a bunch of cycling. It's sort of like rather than miles, I think of it in hours. So for me, exercise is the meditation. I like to exercise on my own. And so the hours, meaning if I can get 60 to 120 minutes a day, I feel much, much, much better than if I get 30 to 45 minutes.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So running anywhere from 40 to 60 miles, I've gotten to the point now where I can go out and run anywhere from 5 to 10 without it's sort of indifferent. It just depends on how long I have. I tend to drink a bunch of water before I go. I tend to work out in the morning so I don't eat that much before. And then afterwards, I'll just have a normal breakfast. Like I don't get into the shakes and proteins and all this. I think if you eat real food and you eat in a balanced way, I think you can be pretty healthy.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bill Bauerman and Phil Nay, founders of Nike, what they built, their partnership, the way they understood each other's strengths, weaknesses, how they work together, what they created is just stunning. My long-term professional goal would be to be on the Nike board.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many. I mean, I just mentioned Pace. I think they're, Chris and Jordan are wonderful. I think what Dave Fontana is doing with HF0 is pretty fascinating. It's these houses. He brings people in, residential program. He's got a real nose for talent and he's doing some amazing things there. I think Meritech doesn't get talked about enough. Max and Alex, I mean, they're just unbelievable in their thinking and so much respect for their focus and what they do. And then my friend Molly at Dorman Fund, I think, is doing amazing work with that community. And I think if you look at the alumni from Dorman Fund and where they've gone on, you can sort of see the quality of the people that she's engaged with and how that community is continuing to form.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been this push to scale, it's eroded the product of venture broadly, the craft approach, whether you're doing that the way Chris and Jordan are doing at a pace where they do it, or you're doing it the way we're doing it, where in exchange for equity, we deliver a very senior person who works in a one-to-one relationship. But I would love to see a return to the one-to-one relationships that build the best companies.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a consistency in prioritizing your family that really matters. The reason it matters is because what children need, they need something to push on and they need to know they're safe in doing that. And so consistency creates those boundaries and you set them appropriately. You can make it a practice to truly listen to your child and then give them whatever it is you think they need, which is very different than what they ask for, but give them what you think they need. And if you do that consistently, and to the best of your ability, I think you'd be a fantastic parent.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe more than you love each other. And you have to make space for your adult relationship to continue when you have the child in the way. But the daily routine kind of keeps me balanced on those values.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't always stick to it, right? You have your aspiration, then you have your actual life. So that was a caveat with that. But I try to get up early, try to do some reading, try to exercise, make breakfast and sit with my daughter, I drive her to school, drop her off. We have great conversations on the way. Although she's in seventh grade now, so she wants to, we're carpooling a little bit. And now she wants to take the bus. I'm afraid I'm going to lose those morning conversations. But it's a nice morning conversation with her, work till, you know, four or five depends. Pick her up from school if I can, take her to sports if I can, spend time on family, dinner, and then go back to work and then try to get six, seven hours of sleep and do it again. There's obviously times where you have to do, you know, you're doing dinners. I think a night out, two nights out a week for work is appropriate. I have a date night every week with my wife. We have date night. I think that's critical. You ask about parenting. I have so much changes when you have a child, but the biggest thing that changes is the person that you love most in the world. Now there's a third person in the room. And each of you loves that person.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so as I was talking about the venture capital business model being broken, Dan was the person who had the courage to do something about it in 2018. And he stepped away from Greylock and he started a business called Sweat Equity Ventures that offered service in exchange for equity. He believed that you could unbundle venture capital from venture services and he convinced Reed Hoffman to invest in the company. He went out and did the work. He earned equity, an amazing companies. Equity is now the portfolio that Reed was the sole LP in. And along the way, I had so much respect for that. We overlapped on a couple boards. And in those board meetings, the founder would move from telling the board what they thought to saying some version of, well, Dan says, and then he would say the answer. And so I had always wanted to find a way to work with him. And so what I left first on, I announced publicly I was ready to build again. And Dan was like the second person to reach out. He's the Michael Jordan of recruiting. And he started talking to me.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You said this, but you said this thing, and it changed the way I thought about the job to take, the timing of leaving one and joining another, the way to navigate some negotiation or some hard time in my professional career. And it was so gratifying to me to know that those little moments that make me happy, giving my thoughts, helping someone work through a challenge, really listening, like truly listening to them, helping them discover that answer that's always inside them. It's always there. bring it out and getting very very good at doing that do it for founders around strategy do it for friends around personal situations but just getting very good at listening and bringing out that person's best answer to whatever challenge they're facing and then supporting them and going after that that brings me happiness and it leads to a moment of people saying thanks and reflecting on that which is joyful”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happiness being the freedom to do what you want, happiness being, you know, you're out with friends, you go for a run when you feel like it, these things, versus changing, what do you call them, nappies and, you know, being up in the middle of the night and so forth. But even when you're unhappy because you're up in the middle of the night and you have a big meeting the next day and you need to get sleep and the baby's crying, there's a moment when the baby stops crying and the fact that you were there holding her when that happened is joy and is different. You're still unhappy that you're awake, but there's joy there. And so anyway, but for me, those moments when people say things like that to me, that makes me happy. Like I went to Dorman Fund had a 10-year anniversary. And there was hundreds of people there. It's an amazing community. But when I was there, I was talking to people, some of whom I met 10 years ago, nine, eight, seven, five, four. Like I met them across this time. And I met them at a time in their life when they were in college. They were figuring out their future. They were graduating. And no fewer than 75 people said to me, hey, you probably don't remember.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An email. A friend wrote me and said he was at a wedding with another friend, a mutual friend of ours. He is a seven month old child. And he was telling this mutual friend, you know, I feel so fulfilled and joyful. Like I feel a joy that I've never felt before. And our mutual friend said to him, I talk to Finn when I had my first child. And he told me, you know, everyone talks to you about, oh, you can't, your life isn't your own anymore and like you can't go out and you see your friends and all these things. You can't work as much as you want and all this. And he said that what I told him when he told me that was that, yeah, you have a child and it's way less happiness, way more joy. That's what it is. You have less happiness moment to moment. You have more joy in these moments that are just beyond you're holding a child. There's something about that.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of it in a couple ways. So I can imagine moments in life that would define happiness, holding your child for the first time, your wedding night, your 20th anniversary of that wedding. For me, one, and this is strange, but you'll like this. For me, a moment that I know I will be happy and I'll know I've lived a good life is if on my deathbed, I'm looking up at my current wife and daughter and they're smiling at me and everything's okay. That's success. And that means that they have been supported by me in the right ways. It means I have lived with integrity. I've honored them and they're there for me at the very end. And that's whatever it is, 60, 70 years from now, hopefully. But so I frame it that way. Day to day, I think happiness comes from the ability to have impact on individuals that you respect. And I think sometimes it comes back to you. I got an email this morning that I was sort of sitting here thinking about what am I going to say to Harry.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the feedback comes back, and it's again a game of telephone. And then you're making a decision because some engineer that you know said it's either good or bad, right? Whereas what we get to do is sit in the room with the founder. The engineer is asking questions not to evaluate what they're doing, but to understand it to know whether we can help and to understand it to know where the holes might be and where the challenges are and do the challenges that we identify align with the challenges that the founder is seeing. And in doing that, it's just a much deeper process. And I think we involve the team in that.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think the traditional process of understanding what a founder is doing technically is as a VC that's not technical, you sit in that room, you do your best to understand, you reach out to someone who is technical, you provide some bastardized description of what that founder is doing. That person is probably polite to you and sort of pretends they understand, but then says, well, maybe just connect with them and I'll talk to them and I'll get you my feedback. Then they do that.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founder around their needs, how they think about sequencing, and how they think about success and recruiting. All the engineering side, we do the same thing. We deeply understand the way people are approaching their technology, what they're building, and in a way that I think goes well beyond what I've done in the past. We sit with an engineer in a meeting with a technical founder and have a conversation about the business, about the product they're building, and about how they're building it. And for me, the ability to be immersed in that conversation and to learn the language that the founder is speaking in that context is unbelievable. It's like, if you want to learn Spanish, you would also learn to surf and do that in Costa Rica. You wouldn't take a Berlitz class or, you know, put some thing in your headphones and listen to it.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Dan and I, and then we have Ben on our team. But the key with us is that the whole team is involved in the process of investing from sourcing to picking, winning, supporting. Everyone on our team plays a role and they play a role by bringing their expertise to that. So if we look at our top of funnel, right? You look at the kind of the sources. 50% of the things we see are sourced by the team because they are very senior. They have incredible networks. People trust them when their friends are starting companies. They come to them and they say, I'm thinking of starting a company. Who should I talk to? And they understand what we look for. They understand the types of companies that are interesting and they service those things to us as a team. Then they're involved along the way. So if we say one of the things that we think about with the founder is how will they build their team as we think about crafting a statement of work and deciding that we could partner with someone, we engage the member of the talent team to talk with that.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same with the losses, right? There's the emerging market stuff, and there's other things. But I think I would look at that one and say, what were the positives? What part of that decision was actually accurate rather than, okay, maybe the overriding lesson is all emerging markets are no good and you just don't invest in emerging markets. And that's a fine lesson. The work you owe yourself is to try to find the positive or the thing you got right in the mistake. And it could be that there's not that the lesson actually is don't invest in emerging markets. Don't invest in these, you know, logistically heavy, like low margin businesses. That's a great lesson and one that you could stick to and probably would be a benefit to the portfolio overall because I do think that there is a reason that most large venture outcomes are software only. There's something powerful in high margin, zero marginal cost growth businesses.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Style person on that team. But the truth is that the glasses had to look good, but that wasn't the point. What they had figured out was something entirely different around supply chain and go-to-market and sort of this D2C motion, evaluating their team against the need for someone who had worked at Luxotica in design was the wrong thing to do. And so I think when you have a big win, it's very easy to say, I want to see something else that looks like this. So I want a founder like Ivan who comes out of design and is quirky in some ways and a genius in most ways and product obsessed and wants to build tools. And that's the way to build systems of record for every facet of business. But then you realize that that worked for him in a very particular way and that there's no other company that's built like that and that most other tools or systems of record are created by people with different mindsets and other ways of thinking.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very important to view every company to the extent you can as its own thing. There are certainly lessons that flow across. There's similarities. God knows we heard so many pitches that were the Uber of X, people trying to play on that exact thing you're talking about. But I think that the challenge with rules, they can distort your vision and you have to decide, is that corrective or is it blurring? Are you seeing more clearly or are you missing something? The thing to do is to ask yourself, why would this rule not apply? Why is this inappropriate in this case? So for example, we were talking about early first round. So top of mind. So mod cloth was a fashion company, they're e-commerce fashion. And there was a belief that the reason that company was working when it was working is that the founder was deep in the vintage clothing space and deeply understood it. She was a buyer. She got all those things. And so the first time we met Worby Parker, those guys didn't have design sense. And like there was...”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned many of those things from Ivan Akshay, watching them build that business, helping them recruit people to join that business and seeing it scale, leaning into things that become system of record for an important job to be done. That lesson kind of came through to me in that first understanding of why Notion was so special.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started investing, I was a product person. I built sneakers and video games. And so my early investments, if I look at them, they were products that I thought should exist from being a product person, you build up a sort of schizophrenia where you can take on the personality of the customer and have empathy and understand their priorities and needs. And then you could imagine a product that would meet those needs and would resonate. And I think I did a lot of that bank simple birch box, even blue apron, I think were those things. The work I did with Notion, I think, was really foundational in understanding the product as a piece of what you're doing, but that understanding the ways that that product drives distribution, the power of software platforms versus just an application, and the sense of a product that can grow with the user and deepen that attachment over time and sort of lock in, I guess you would call it.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a believer that spikes is what matters. So if someone's strongest talent is the thing that you should be focused on. But I think that there are things like the example you just gave, the salesperson who can lay out the three acts, but operationally they can't execute sort of to get on stage in the first place, right? That's the challenge. And I think in that case, the quality of that founder, the value they will create is a multiplication problem, not an addition problem. And so if you have a zero anywhere in a multiplication problem, the value is zero. And I think that my mistakes with founders have been missing the consequences of a weakness and being overwhelmed with the strength of a spike and not realizing how they won't even be able to apply that spike because they lack something else that will mitigate that strength. I think that's been the weakness. I think I haven't been overwhelmed with someone where I misperceive their strengths as much as I think sort of misunderstanding the impact of a potential weakness.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I've experienced both. I think that in the first case, whether it's Travis needing to know that there's Uber X or it's Ivan needing to know that there's going to be integrations with Segment and other things and it's going to become the central data knowledge repository for a company. I don't think so. I think they need to be passionate about the core product they're building, but they need to know that they want and will find more than just that. They need to understand that this is the foundation of something, that then there will be another act. I've also had the experience with multiple founders where in the first conversation you sit down with them and they understand their business in three acts and they lay it out and then they go after that. And so I think you can have both. But the key thing is in both cases, the founders know there's more. They know they want more than the core thing they're doing. And they also have a deep appreciation for getting the first act right.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create online. And in doing so, he's going to create value. There's no market there. It's not a note-taking tool. If you convince yourself there's a note taking tool, then you're not interested in that because Evernote wasn't great and you go down the list, right? When you sort of say there's a vision here and then there's the ability, this market timing means people want this tool to enable them to express their creativity in some way. They want to do these different things. Then you allow that founder back to sort of choosing founders to guide that company within that opportunity set.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree. I think market structure. So, what you're talking about with emerging market is market structure and all of the friction that comes from a less either regulated or mature developed market, that's accurate. When I think of market, I think, is Uber about owning the black car market, the taxicab market, or the auto market, or the delivery of all things and transportation market. I think when you get stuck thinking through that and working through the hundred reasons why owning the black car market isn't worth it, then you miss Travis would figure out Uber X. And I think in that, when I say market timing is this is a team Garrett and Travis, they are going to earn a dollar letting me press a button and take a black car somewhere in San Francisco. I have in a notion is going to figure out how to create a digital tool that is as elegant as a blank piece of paper and a pen so that you can”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the $7 million seed when you've already raised two and you have a product in market, et cetera. I think then it's about the market timing. And what I mean by that market timing versus market is the ability to get that early traction. What is it that says now is the time that you're going to be able to find those first 10, 100,000, 10,000 users, you're going to be able to sell in, there's a problem that exists that you can solve. What is it about the market timing that suggests that you can get that early traction known as Peter Fenn or somebody else kind of like you earn the right to make $10 million in ARR by making a million dollars in ARR. And once you make $10, then you earn the right to make $100. And once you make $100, you can make a billion. I mean, it's sort of this idea. And I think for early stage investors, it matters much less that there's a billion dollar opportunity in a market. There's a TAM that you can back your way into that suggests that there's tens of billions to be captured. And it's much more important that the person can earn a dollar.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think founders are first. And the reason I say that is because the ability of a founder to surprise and to shock you with the way they view a market, the opportunity that they identify that no one else has seen, the ability to execute against that. Like that is why I do this is to meet those people. And so if I can't align my business model, my returns with the thing that brings me joy in the work, I struggle. And then second, if you're investing at a stage where traction can exist, I think that early doesn't have to be at scale, but that passion or engagement of a user base is something that is often overlooked because like the N is too small, you know, you have hundreds of people that are spending hours or revisiting this thing on a daily basis versus tens of thousands. But I think those early signals should not be ignored. But I think when you're investing before there's a product, like often what we call formation stage is sort of that true seed, you know, preceded.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, although I think that with seed, knowing that it's more competitive, knowing that the capital of the next round is harder to come by, I think that just raises the bar on how much of a standout you need to be as a founder and as a company. It elevates that urgency around execution and delivery. And I feel like the early stage with a lot of what's happening in the market is actually pretty interesting. If you start chasing people up the ladder, 5 on 50, 10 on 40, we see these rounds. And there's also something with raising too much capital at a certain point where it doesn't make sense for the company. And I think there's adverse effects in terms of the culture of the business if you raise too much. But I find I'm excited about seed and finding the companies that will be building durable businesses over the next couple years.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't. When Dan and I were designing the firm, one of the core things was that it would be an unbundled offering because we trust the founders to know their critical needs and we want them to be able to choose where we have a unique product that gives them a specific advantage over the rest of the market and where we don't. Of the 19 investments we've made, 15 of them have done services, four of them haven't, but of the four that haven't, two of them have already come back six, nine months into the partnership and asked to engage with the services team around specific challenges that they're facing.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do the general partnership product tends to appeal to more experienced founders, folks who are a little deeper into their careers. They've either started a company before or they've worked in industry for longer, so they've seen more. They understand how hard it is to hire an amazing person. The critical nature of that DNA early in a company's life and all of the opportunity that that can open up, they understand what it means to have a world-class technology and product organization in the first year of operation and what that means not just for their product, but also for their ability to recruit down the line, their ability to sign up customers earlier in the life of the company to learn from the market much sooner because you can touch that market with something that they can appreciate and understand. The very best founders are those that they have the maturity to have that North Star. They have the maturity to understand their critical needs to get there and they're willing to do whatever it takes to sort of have those cheat codes along the way.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard, but hard doesn't mean you can't win. You can find the founders that resonate with what you're doing, that recognize that the difference in dilution is something that they can make up for with progress. And the most experienced ones with the clearest vision will make that choice. And we've seen that so far with the GP. We've made 19 early stage investments. 14 or 15 have been competitive and often competitive with large funds. And we are not the highest price. We're not winning on price. I think we're winning because we're offering something different.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think there's a lot of belly aching about the market's broken, the mega funds are coming down. Maybe I think differently about this because I was fortunate enough to have the experience of winning against those firms in the past with lower prices and smaller rounds. And so when I hear people say that, I think you have a product problem. And if you can't convince a founder partnering with you is what's best for their business. In the face of your competition, you need to do something different. And I hear people say, oh, it means I'm not going to chase the best founders. I'm not going to chase the hottest opportunities. I don't have a chance to win those things. And I think you're hamstringing yourself when you think that way. If you really believe in your product and you really believe what you're doing, you have to test that in competition with the very best funds, the largest funds, and they have a structural advantage. I agree. Their cost of capital is lower than yours. They can write a $5 million check and not think about it. And that's a larger percentage of my fund, of your fund makes it.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's great. They earn the right onto a locked cap table with their expertise and their advice. They can capture the most valuable asset in the startup ecosystem, which is equity in that company because of that, whether they do it through capital or advice. And I would imagine some of them will do both.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would imagine that success, let's say 2020 product, 20 growth, 20 sales are successful. Your founders are accessing those people. They have a conversation. They get some advice. They find it to be impactful. They go back to that same person. They build a relationship. And before you know it, that person who you had on 20 product is now an advisor for that founder compensated with equity.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think nothing against Sam, but they probably don't need him, right? That's what I think. If someone says the best founders don't need help, would I hear them saying is the best founders don't need my help? And that's probably true in most cases when a VC says it. But I think that if you look at the best founders, they are constantly accessing the very best sources of advice, guidance, and hands-on support and help to build their companies to achieve their goals and get to their North Star as fast as they can and as high quality as they possibly can every single one. They all have a trusted group of people. They all have folks that they bring into their company who do unbelievable work. Every great founder has that support. And so every great founder needs help. They just don't need it from VCs.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To continue with ongoing recruiting support, we need a new statement of work, and that's a new investment for us. And we evaluate that against every other investment that we could make with that same resource.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first answer is our goal is not to scale. Our goal is to maximize quality of service delivery and impact on a smaller number of super high quality companies. And we've looked at how the business can deliver that even as the portfolio scales, because you're right that over time that portfolio scales. And so every engagement, we work with a founder, we partner with them to understand their needs. We have a written statement of work that we collaborate with them on. That statement of work describes what we will do. It describes the time that it will take for us to do that. And then the amount of equity they will earn when we deliver success against that statement of work. And those statements of work tend to be somewhere between $6 and 15 months long. They work across recruiting product and engineering and go to market. The founders can pick and choose where they need the help, or if they don't need the help at all, we can just invest capital and they can come back to us at some point when they want to engage. But when the statement of work is delivered, then that engagement is over. And if they want.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best searches are not. Oh, you need an engineer? We know a lot of engineers. Here's a Google Sheet with a bunch of LinkedIn links. Good luck. That's not recruiting. And so at the GPU, when we do recruiting, we do the first thing. We engage with a founder. We understand their needs. We have a person who maybe was the lead tech recruiter at Facebook for six years or was part of building Stripes engineering teams two through N come and sit with that founder and understand their roadmap and then understand how they're aligning that roadmap with their hiring needs. And then we go out and we build the context, we build the funnel, we bring those people through and we manage that process end to end. And that accelerates that process, it increases the quality of it. And we can do that because our business model means that that work is a revenue center for the firm rather than a cost center because we are an equity for doing that work rather than paying for that out of fee as sort of some differentiating factor in terms.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're completely right, which again speaks to the need for a one-to-one relationship versus a pooled resource. If you look at how the very best companies hire, someone's going to go find a CMO or a VPE. The very best searches, the companies are at a scale where they probably have a head of talent or a head of people. They probably have a recruiting team. They assign that role to a single person who figures out how to understand the needs of the company, how to then go out, identify some candidates for context building with the hiring manager. They then build a pipeline. They set up an interview loop. They bring those people through. They guide them all the way through from evaluation to offer to close. They get them in the seat and then they help them be successful. And one person will own that. Whether that person is maybe an outsourced executive recruiter or someone internally on the team. And that is how the very best searches are done is that there is a single person who owns that search. They collaborate with the hiring manager and they run it end to end.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Delivery anytime you move away from one to one high context from someone with deep domain expertise in that given area and someone who's been in the trenches very recently like the half-life of operating experience is is very very short now things are changing very quickly and so you need people who are doing this day in and day out and who have tremendously deep experience and they're able to deliver in a way that you can only do in a one-to-one fashion”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although I think the fund size increases were about investing bigger checks and more companies, moving faster, deploying more capital. And I think some of the fee justification came from we built out this service team. Although I think no matter how big your fund gets, I don't think you ever have the resource to meet the needs of your companies in an appropriate or impactful way. Even when you look at the largest firms and the services they provide, they are not any longer providing one-to-one. It used to be, please come meet with our go-to-market expert. They will spend time with you once a week for six months. Then it was you and a cohort of people are going to come and meet with our go-to-market expert. And then now you're seeing the rise of programs. Everybody has a program and they're running people through programs in order to add value. And maybe it's an intense, an intense weekend with 100 of your promising startups, right? And I just think that there's this constant erosion of value.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you see a cost center, you try to do two things one, you try to minimize that cost. And then two, you try to amortize it across as many customers as you can. And so the result of that work to optimize for the GP business model is you end up with increasingly junior people paying increasingly fractionalized attention to a founder's most critical needs. You see efforts to productize and scale services. And services don't scale. You can scale a product, but the way you scale a product is you make it more and more static, you make it more and more brittle, and you make sure that it's more and more generic and it can meet the marginal needs of many customers, but it doesn't meet the critical needs of any customer. That is the problem with the business model today. If you're trying to differentiate by providing service.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The venture firms realized that they had to differentiate, and it wasn't enough to be a smart person with expertise, but you needed to do more. And so you had this industrial revolution in venture capital. And you saw platform teams. And when Andreessen launched, that was when Greylock hired my now co-founder Dan Purcio. He was the best recruiter in Silicon Valley, still is. And they needed more than capital. So they brought him in to lead recruiting and talent in 2011. And he did amazing work 2011 to 2018. And things kept scaling and platforms kept getting bigger. But the challenge with the business model adventure in a world where you need to differentiate with product. And if you choose to do it that way, then the fee and carry model doesn't work because those services show up as a cost center on the statement, the cash flow statement of the VC firm itself. And so as a good business person,”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think this observation I started feeling this way in 2018, venture as an industry has evolved tremendously from the 70s when it started and you had folks like Don Valentine jumping into hot tubs with Nolan Bushnell and investing in Atari. I mean these stories of a cottage industry with people who were maybe a little bit crazy risk seeking, but also brought with them deep domain expertise, partnering with technologists, people who had crafted unbelievable products or deeply understood a new technology. Chips like Silicon Valley is because it was hardware. And they would partner with folks who understood go-to-market and distribution. It was a one-to-one relationship. And together, companies would emerge in that collaboration. But the one-to-one relationship was the key. And that was a cottage industry. Like any financial arbitrage, it was eroded away as more and more people thought, oh, there's big returns in venture. I can come down. I can take that risk. And so at some point,”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would push on that a little bit because I think your push into 20 sales, 20 product, 20 growth, those are expansions that actually bolster the brand. We have a certain style of interviewing that has to do with going very, very deep with experts in a space so they share their knowledge with folks. We're building community of those people. And we've started with VC, but now we're going to choose adjacencies and we're going to take that same approach. And I think my view, I'm not in your business, but my view of what you're doing is you've created a media property that has tremendous benefit for your venture fund, right? And so those two things are symbiotic from a product perspective, from a revenue perspective, from the value you can provide to your founders and so forth. So I think the whole thing works together. And I think the same for any for anyone who's a customer. And I think founders are customers. And the way you craft and deliver product matters a lot.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That work out? I mean, you know, I think for folks who have been able to do that without eroding their brand and without eroding the service. But I think it's a very, very hard thing to do if you define yourself as delivering a service in a unique way for a unique stage of company. And then you expand beyond that. I think the only way to do that is to say at that later stage, either as a different product. So we do seed and we do it this way. And then because of our brand and reputation as seed, we earn the right to be on cap tables at the later stage. That's just capital. And we're a commodity capital provider. And our value is that we won't be detrimental. You could take that approach, or you could say it's a separate team, which the mega funds have tried to do and said we have a separate team that focuses in this different way. It really meaningful that this scout investment because it's in the scout fund versus the seed fund versus the growth fund versus the mega fund, yeah.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of bringing together hip hop and hoops and making that mainstream. When you look at what First John did in seed, it's very much the beginning of that journey. It's you own a niche, focus entirely on a founder at a certain stage and you work in a certain way. And I think at the general partnership, we're also trying to do that with founders who want to build their companies in a very specific way. And I think that's a niche that we can try to own.”
2023-10-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source